


I don't have forever or time to waste

by tamerofdarkstars



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Coulson is a badass, Coulson might be immortal, Everyone's a badass, Fluff, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Pre-Slash, So is Clint, we'll never know
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-14
Updated: 2014-05-14
Packaged: 2018-01-24 16:54:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,201
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1612442
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tamerofdarkstars/pseuds/tamerofdarkstars
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Phil Coulson can't catch a break, tadpoles have teeth, Clint struggles with feelings, and no one does any paperwork.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I don't have forever or time to waste

**Author's Note:**

> Holy crap, this fandom is full of such talented writers - I hope you don't mind me trying my hand at it. This is quick, dirty, and unbeta'd so any mistakes are my own.
> 
> The title is from the song Don't Let Me Be Lonely by The Band Perry.

Phil Coulson checks his email before he gets out of bed. It’s habit, born of his college days and that unique early morning desperation that his pre-dawn classes had been cancelled. It’s funny how eight am seemed so early back then, and now Phil considers himself late if he’s not up and showered by six.

He pulls his legs up to his chest, pressing his bare feet into the sheets as he flicks his finger up his Starkphone. He has seventeen unread emails, and all of them are Important, but nothing is Life-Threatening, and he can deal with at least thirteen of them in the early morning traffic.

Phil drops his phone onto his chest and stretches like a cat, feeling his spine crack in three different places. Not a bad morning, all in all. He swings his legs over his bed and pads to the bathroom to get ready.

Traffic is, as predicted, completely terrible, and Phil’s mood has deflated significantly by the time he reaches SHIELD. His coffee is a tad on the cold side, but he drinks it without so much as a flicker of distaste, answering Important Email #14 as he rides the elevator. Three more have come in between his shower and his morning bagel – there appears to be some kind of disaster over on the fifth floor, but he’s only been cc’d, and Phil’s confident they can handle it.

Well, mostly confident. Fifth floor’s got good people.

Phil manages to work in peace and quiet for two hours and thirty-seven minutes – which might be a record, actually – before the day’s hell breaks loose. He checks his watch and sighs, already halfway out the door, his phone tucked in the crook of his neck. “Yessir. On my way, I’ll be on location in seventeen minutes.”

Seventeen – four for the hallway, one and a half for the elevator, two and a half for the parking garage and nine for the drive.

To his extreme irritation, it actually takes him twenty-two minutes to get to the current section of New York that’s being magically demolished – traffic. It’s the bane of Phil’s existence, behind murderous aliens and screechy pop music – and if he slams the door to the non-descript black vehicle a little harder than necessary, well, he’s the only one who needs to know.

The Avengers are already on scene, and Phil arrives just in time to catch the Hulk roar in fury, slamming his hand down and destroying several meters of street. They’ve got the scene well-contained, most civilians out of harm’s way, and Phil’s chest absolutely does not tighten just a little bit with the swell of actual, legitimate affection for his scruffy band of basket cases. Instead, he coolly fits himself with an earpiece and waits impatiently for the junior agent in the van next to him to get ears up.

This week, the source of his paperwork looks almost like… tadpoles? If tadpoles could fly, zipping around the city with quick, sharp movements. If tadpoles had teeth an inch long and sharper than the stiletto blade he knows Natasha keeps in her boot.

Phil clips his vest, giving the knot around his throat a quick tug. He checks his gun while the rest of his team of agents races around him, like a river around a rock, getting into formation.

“Sir? We have ears.” The tech in the van gives him the ok and he nods, flicking his fingers at the agents around him. They immediately launch themselves into the battle, spreading out to cause maximum damage.

Phil takes a deep, steadying breath and puts two fingers to the piece in his ear. “Coulson here. Status report.”

He waits a beat, watching the carnage unfold. One, two, thr—

“Black Widow, checking in.” Natasha sounds completely unfazed by the fact that they’re fighting mutant flying tadpoles with teeth and Phil’s chest floods with warmth for her soft, even voice. That’s one.

“Captain America, all in one piece.”

“Coulson, I was having lunch. You interrupted lunch. I’m fighting _hungry_.”

“Tony, knock it off. Hoard of ‘em on your tail.”

“Oops, hey, look at that.”

Iron Man streaks over Phil’s head, a blur of red and gold against the blue of the sky and it’s only Phil’s staunch professionalism that stops him from rolling his eyes to the sky.

So that’s Steve, Natasha, Tony… The Other Guy is using cars to smash clouds of flying tadpoles, so Phil checks him off his list.

“I am present, Son of Coul. These adversaries are proving most… irritating.” Thor has that interesting note to his voice that means he is quickly losing his patience and Phil can imagine his frustration. The little buggers are quick, zipping about in wild, irregular patterns and are difficult to hit. Thor’s sweeping attacks with Mjölnir are only hitting one or two tadpoles at a time, even with his speed and deadly accuracy.

So. Phil ticks them off in his head. Steve, Natasha, Bruce, Thor, Tony… That just leaves—

Something whizzes past his face, inches from his left cheek and one of the tadpole things dies with a squelch, pinned to the wall with a black shafted arrow.

Phil blinks at it, wondering just how close to his face it had gotten when Clint’s voice comes through the comm.

“Hawkeye, checking in, sir.”

And there it is, there’s that gut-clenching warmth that sweeps through him from head to toe the moment Clint breaks the radio silence. Phil’s face doesn’t change, doesn’t flicker, doesn’t even twitch from the immovable stony professionalism but inside… inside he’s a teenager, a kid, a fool so head over heels in love with the archer-sniper crouched on a roof somewhere above him that it’s only a matter of time before it begins to affect his job performance.

“How many are there, Barton?” Phil’s voice is steady and even, even if his heartbeat isn’t.

“You want an exact count, sir, ‘cause that might take a while.” Barton’s voice is low and warm and just this side of affectionate and oh hell. Phil cocks his weapon and enters the fray, picking off tadpoles with a deadly accuracy born from years of practice and diligent training. What kind of a handler is he, to go and fall in love with his agent?

“Of course not.” Phil grunts, squeezing off a round. “A rough approximation will be more than adequate.”

“Fewer than there were.” Natasha offers and Clint huffs a laugh that, over the comm, sounds like a rush of static. A rush of static that goes straight to Phil’s gut, like someone’s pinched his insides between a thumb and forefinger and is twisting, hard. Maybe it’s that his memory, excellent that it is, can picture the exact look on Clint’s face, a wry, amused, appreciative one-sided smirk that Phil knows is directly tuned into Natasha’s dry sort of wit.

“I’d say we’ve taken out about half of them.” Steve’s voice is clipped and even – he doesn’t even sound out of breath, which makes Phil incredibly jealous.

“Scanners agree with ya, Cap.” If Phil didn’t know any better, he’d say Tony almost sounds impressed. As it is, Tony and Steve and their ridiculous dance around being _TonyandSteve_ is not anything Phil wants to be a part of. He threw a few dollars at Natasha weeks ago, and has a few more months before he expects one of them to break. Hell, if they make it to July he stands to double his bet.

“Coulson, on your six o’clock.”

Coulson’s body is reacting to Clint’s voice before his mind has caught up to the words, and he splatters a group of tadpoles against the nearest wall.

It takes somewhere between half an hour and forty minutes to wrap up the rest of the tadpoles – and isn’t it just as Phil thinks he’s seen everything, they fight mutant _tadpoles_ on a Thursday morning – but it’s going to take Phil far far longer to wrap up the scene. He’s just getting off the phone with Fury, thinking about the mountains and mountains of paperwork this is going to take, when Natasha appears at his side. She does so like she always does – silent and invisible up until the moment she’s not, and Phil doesn’t react beyond the smooth raise of an eyebrow.

They exchange simultaneous eye flicks, up and down, checking each other for injury. Natasha’s eyes narrow almost instantly and Phil frowns, looking down with her.

Oh. He’s bleeding. One of the tadpoles must have bitten him. That’s… huh.

“I didn’t even feel it.” He says, or at least he thinks he does. All around him, SHIELD agents are swarming like ants over the scene, packing equipment and checking injuries, but they’re… strange. Blurry, almost, kind of a weird fuzzy around the edges. In fact, Phil’s vision is blurring more and more every second.

“Haa.” He says, and Natasha is moving, coming closer, he thinks, and there’s a strong grip on his upper arm. Something falls from his hand and he’s not sure what exactly it is, but he’s pretty sure it’s important and shouldn’t be in the dirt and the rubble.

Someone is talking – the voice is strong and Phil recognizes it, but nothing makes sense and he _can’t see_ , everything’s horrifically blurry blobs of color and whoa there. He sways on his feet, feeling his body go rubbery and soft, and then there’s a hand on his back, five fingers splayed wide, supporting him and there’s a voice, in his ear, and the voice is saying words, he knows it is, but the words don’t make sense, the roll of vowels and click of consonants falling garbled to the pavement. Phil can almost picture them, a tangle of letters tumbling visibly into an unrecognizable heap to the ruined sidewalk.

But the voice is still talking, saying the same words over and over, and Phil should pay attention, he needs to pay attention, the voice is important to him. He likes the voice – it makes him feel warm inside, makes his chest feel like it’s expanding and contracting at the same time, makes him crawl inside his own skin, itchy and unfulfilled and just a little bit desperate and he tries to turn towards the voice, to tell its owner that he’s _fine_ , really, at least, he’s pretty sure he is, there’s no reason for the voice to have gone up half an octave, no reason for the voice to be shouting because he’s _fine_.

Isn’t he?

-

Phil wakes up all at once and immediately hates himself for it – he doesn’t move an inch, feeling the various parts of his body ache and throb at varying intervals and wonders what the hell happened.

Tadpoles?

There’s machines beeping somewhere to his left and he listens for a moment, calculating, and places them roughly two feet directly left of his shoulder. There’s an IV in his wrist and… he listens harder, eyes still shut against the fluorescent lights he knows are humming above him. One other person in the room?

He opens his eyes and the room swims into focus. Yep, infirmary. The Avengers Wing, if he’s correct. They’re injured so often that the medical staff threw up its collective hands in defeat and sectioned off an entire wing of the hospital for them.

Phil tests his mobility, hissing in pain. His body feels as though thousands of tiny needles are stuck in every crease of skin, every joint.

“Fuck me.” He mumbles, dropping all semblances of professionalism as he squeezes his eyes shut, clenching and unclenching the muscles in his jaw.

“Uh, no thank you, but I do appreciate the offer.”

Phil’s eyes fly open and he turns his head too quickly. The room sways like the deck of a ship and he feels distinctly nauseous. Bruce Banner appears equal parts amused and exhausted, sitting in a little plastic chair to the right of the bed.

“Banner.” Phil croaks and Bruce’s smile grows.

“Hello, Agent Coulson.” Bruce says, keeping his voice soft and pleasant and Phil is grateful. He feels like he was run over by a truck. He opens his mouth, taking a breath to ask, but Bruce is already talking.

“One of the slug-tadpole things found its way under your slacks and bit you up pretty badly. Turns out their fangs inject a fast-acting venom that numbs the area and systematically shuts down every major bodily function one at a time.” Bruce’s lips twist unhappily. “You were… in a pretty bad state for a while.”

Phil blinks at the ceiling and wonders how many more times he can cheat death before the grim reaper shows up to physically drag his ass into the afterlife.

Bruce watches him for a moment, letting him absorb the information. Phil clears his throat. “Water?” He asks hoarsely, and Bruce is up and holding a cup to his lips almost immediately. He swallows as much water as he thinks he can take without vomiting and lets his head fall back to the pillow.

“Anyone else?” He asks and Bruce shakes his head.

“Everyone’s been patched up. Steve is catching Director Fury up right now. Natasha sustained a few scrapes and bruises, but Thor and Tony are fine. Clint,” Bruce glances at the door, and Phil feels his stomach roll, the fear sudden and intense.

“Clint is fine – he twisted his wrist rolling off the roof. I finally made him leave and get it looked at.”

Phil lets out a sigh he didn’t realize he was holding and squeezes his eyes shut, lifting his arms with a groan to rub at the sore skin around his eyeballs. “Oh, _fuck_ , the paperwork for this alone…” He lets his arms fall back to the bed and winces when the action sends shooting pain up his elbows. “Ow.”

Bruce nods sympathetically. “Yeah, the doctors warned that might be a side effect of the toxin leaving your body. Should be over in… just under ten hours now.”

Phil doesn’t tend to swear liberally, and he’s already used two in the past ten minutes but he’s incredibly tempted to use another. Bruce is standing up, walking around the bed to the beeping machine at his left and Phil watches him.

“Banner, what are you doing.” He demands, even though he knows exactly what Banner is doing. “I can’t go back to sleep, do you have any idea how much work I have to do?”

Bruce just shakes his head and presses a button on the machine. There’s a swoosh and a hiss and the machine dispenses medicine into the IV. Phil groans, recognizing he’s lost the battle already, and sure enough, not even a minute goes by before the room is swimming pleasantly. He’s asleep before the two-minute mark.

-

The second time Phil wakes up is a lot nicer than the first – he’s in a lot less pain, for one thing. He gives his limbs an experimental stretch and is pleased when they only twinge a little.

To his right, someone catches his breath.

Phil blinks his eyes open, turning his head and meeting Clint’s eyes.

Clint looks, in a word, terrible. He’s wearing an old threadbare t-shirt and SHIELD issued sweats and there’s a cast around his left wrist, but it’s his eyes – his clear, bright eyes that look haunted and sunken, like he hasn’t been sleeping.

Phil huffs, using his concern to squash that fleeting leap of joy his heart had performed the moment he’d laid eyes on Clint.

“Barton.” He croaks. “You haven’t been sleeping.”

Clint coughs a rasping laugh into his injured wrist and when his head comes back up, his eyes are shining and Phil’s heart does a goddamn backflip. “Good to see you awake, sir.”

Phil has to look away, look up at the ceiling because damn it, he’s been poisoned by a vicious man-eating _tadpole_ and his prided professionalism is melting away alarmingly fast for someone who needs to hide mountains of inappropriate affections from the world’s most observant assassin.

“Nat’s here too – she just went to get some coffee.” Clint is quiet, and Phil glances back at him. The mirth is gone from his gaze. It’s been replaced with something a little darker, a little guiltier and Phil knows that look, has seen it more times than he can count and he struggles to push himself up on an elbow, hell-bent on wiping that look off of Clint’s face.

Clint makes a noise in the back of his throat and forces him back down, one strong hand pressing on his shoulder. Phil glares at him and Clint glares right back and they stare each other down for a long electric moment before Phil acquiesces and lets Clint manhandle him back into bed.

And isn’t _that_ an idea he’d like to revisit sometime very soon. Geez.

“Barton, it’s not your fault I was careless.” Phil says finally, examining the ceiling with interest. He turns his head to find Clint staring at him, eyes flicking away the moment Phil catches him looking. The motion warms Phil’s stomach instantly, filling him with a kind of liquid fire that rises up and catches in his throat.

“You…” Clint’s voice is so quiet Phil has to strain to hear it. “You were in pretty bad shape for a while there. Sir.”

“So I’ve been told.” A thought strikes him then – a thought so ludicrous and so amazingly hopeful that he has to stop and blink a few times, letting it form fully.

Phil examines Clint, really looks at him, takes in the circles beneath his eyes, and the way he’s folded up on that stupid plastic chair, leaning towards him like he can’t help himself, eyes bright and earnest and full of a thick, liquid something that Phil just can’t quite bring himself to identify just yet and Phil Coulson takes a breath. His right hand has been laying on top of the sheets and he moves it, just a few centimeters to the right before flipping his hand over and laying it flat, palm up.

Then he waits.

Clint stares at the hand and then at Phil and then at the hand again and Phil has a sudden doubt, a sudden sick swoop of fear that he’s read the entire situation backwards and there’s nothing there but his own projections when Clint shifts in his chair, moving forward cautiously, almost hesitantly, and places his calloused hand on Phil’s.

Phil curls their fingers together and squeezes gently and Clint sighs, a deep long rush of air that drains tension from his back and shoulders. He drops his head, letting it hang in the space between them and then Clint squeezes his hand back.

Phil settles his head back on the pillow and closes his eyes, the smile on his face curling in at the corners and thinks _well._

It’s not much – just a steady warmth pulsing in his right hand - but it’s so much more than what it is because this is Clint. This is peace, this is security, this is the painful flare of blinding hope and want and need. This is the _beginning_ and right now, this is all Phil needs.


End file.
